Mention suggestion is a social networking function provided to make it convenient for users to mention their friends, and this function generally brings the following experience to users: when a user inputs a mention symbol (such as @) in a social network, or further inputs an incomplete user name (such as the first letter of the user name) following the mention symbol, the social network infers different degrees of intimacy between the user and different friends of the user according to historical data of the user on the current website, and then automatically suggests multiple possible user names; the user directly selects a corresponding user name, thereby improving an input speed of the user.
However, with the development of social networking, a real user generally registers on different social networks with different user names or nicknames. Therefore, a suggestion result provided by an existing social network merely according to historical data on the current website cannot fully reflect degrees of intimacy between the user and different friends. As a result, the suggestion result is usually significantly different from a user name that the user wants to input, which affects the input speed of the user.